Primary Menu

My Favorite Summer Books!

This post was definitely inevitable. I love to read and I have loved to read since I was a little girl. My first book was, The Cat in the Hat. I read it aloud to my dad, and the rest was history.

I love mostly contemporary fiction and nonfiction, specifically memoir. There are a few books I’ve read already this year that have been sort of life-changing. Below is a mix of novels and essays. I’ve tried to link the titles to independent bookstores. I do enjoy Amazon, but when it comes to books and especially promoting books here, I also want to promote the independent publishers and bookshops that work really hard to get the books into your hands. Just some food for thought, when you next go book shopping.

This was definitely one of my favorite books I’ve read in a long time. The prose has stayed with me, even though I finished the book month’s ago. For me, that makes a noteworthy book. It’s a nonfiction book of essays by Durga Chew-Bose, that will truly blow you away as you learn about the author’s up-bringing, background, and watch her evolve as an adult. Highly recommend this one.

“To this day, watching a woman mindlessly tend to one thing while doing something else absorbs me. Like securing the backs of her earrings while wiggling her feet into her shoes. Like staring into some middle distance, where lines soften, and where she separates the relevant from the immaterial.”

This right here is a LIFE ALTERING BOOK. The book is by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and Asha Bandle with a forward by Angela Davis. Every other page, I found myself in tears. It’s definitely a book for every human being right now, struggling or not in this world. It’s a teacher and a reference, brimming with stories of times when injustice was so prevalent it hurts, but also times when there is oh so much love. It’s physically a small book, easy to carry with you, and enjoy.

“The binary that makes a person either good or bad is a dangerously false one for the widest majority of people. I am beginning to see that more than a single truth can live at the same time and in the same person.”

If you want to pee-in-your-pants laugh, this book is for you. It’s another book of essays, but unlike any I’ve read in a long time. In the hilarious vein of Sloane Crosley’s writing, but also completely her own, Samantha Irby owns what it is to be a messy and beautiful human in this world. It made me laugh and cry on repeat.

“My alarm goes off at 5:50 a.m. First thing I do is check to make sure I’m not dead. If I am, in fact, still alive, I usually sob uncontrollably until there’s nothing left in my tear ducts but salt dust, then grope blindly through my apartment to the bathroom, where I say a little prayer for a hole to open beneath my building and swallow us all.”

I’m not usually a fan of fiction, but this novel took the cake. It’s in one word: beautiful. I highly recommend this to anyone who appreciates beautiful prose and a beautiful story.

“We are all children who lose our parents, all of us, every man and woman and boy and girl, and we too will all be lost by those who come after us and love us, and this loss unites humanity, unites every human being, the temporary nature of our being-ness, and our shared sorrow, the heartache we each carry and yet too often refuse to acknowledge in one another.”

I found this book to be a true roller-coaster of emotions. The novel by Ottessa Moshfegh is still haunting me weeks after I finished it. I’m really looking forward to her upcoming book debuting this summer. If you’re in the mood for something dark, this is for you.

“The idea that my brains could be untangled, straightened out, and thus refashioned into a state of peace and sanity was a comforting fantasy.”